POLITICO: Putin’s Alaska triumph

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks to his U.S. Donald Trump counterpart on the runway at Anchorage in Alaska.
Photo: Getty Images

Call it the old pals act.

Russia’s leader had good reason to look delighted by his meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, POLITICO writes.

From the moment Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin disembarked from their planes at a Cold War-era air force base outside Anchorage, Alaska, their public interactions were notably friendly — with the U.S. president applauding the Russian ruler, an exchange of smiles, a pat on the shoulder, an animated but clearly friendly conversation on the red carpet.

And then, after an American military flyover, the stunning protocol-buster of Putin climbing into “the Beast” — the U.S. president’s official car — to share a limousine ride to the critical summit.

The Russian leader seemed delighted. As well he might.

While Ukraine wasn’t sold out, Putin still appears to have got the most out of the encounter.

He secured the meeting and was greeted on American soil as a friend.

And he got all this without agreeing any major concessions, including a ceasefire, beforehand — and left Anchorage without having committed to a truce either.

The highly anticipated and hastily arranged Alaska summit was never likely to mirror the map-redrawing summit of Yalta, where Joseph Stalin cajoled Franklin Roosevelt and a grumbling Winston Churchill to carve up Europe between Western and Soviet spheres.

Nor was it going to be a breakthrough summit like Reykjavik, where in 1986 Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev laid the groundwork for future nuclear arms control, adding to the thawing of the Cold War.

Gorbachev, of course, was trying to manage a graceful dissolution of the Soviet Union; Putin is intent on resurrecting the empire.

Certainly, the Kremlin and Russia’s state-directed media has been busy portraying the summit as less about Ukraine and more about Putin and Trump, leaders of the great powers, sitting together to decide the shape of the global future. Ahead of the summit, Putin also got an American endorsement of the idea of Ukraine trading land for peace, loading the dice against Kyiv.

In his press conference remarks, Putin went out of his way to praise Trump for his efforts to end the war. The Russian leader is smart enough to know that respectful applause of Trump always goes down well, a gambit Ukraine’s passionate President Volodymyr Zelenskyy almost fatally failed to play in his infamous Oval Office meeting early this year.

But there were no signs that Putin is ready to shift away from his main goal — to control Ukraine, a nation he doesn’t believe should even exist.

That was clear as he talked yet again about eliminating the “root causes” of the war and referred to the “fundamental threats to [Russia’s] security.”

“We have always thought of Ukraine as a brotherly nation,” he lamented. In other words, a nation that is part of Putin’s construct of the Russian world.

Putin’s aim with the Alaska summit no doubt was to avoid prompting Trump’s ire, to hold off on more Western sanctions being imposed on Russia or its allies, and to carry on much as he has.

The Russian president sought to present himself as a constructive partner for peace, saying he hoped others wouldn’t try to throw in a wrench to stop progress toward the ending of the war.

And, of course, prolonging the conflict puts further strain on European nations and the transatlantic alliance.

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